


how beloved above all else

by Quillori



Category: Le città invisibili | Invisible Cities - Italo Calvino
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-17
Updated: 2018-12-17
Packaged: 2019-09-21 07:31:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,282
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17039462
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quillori/pseuds/Quillori
Summary: Perhaps all stories are love stories in their way.





	how beloved above all else

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Melody_Jade](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Melody_Jade/gifts).



> A description of the city of Euphemia, from _Le città invisibili_ :
>
>> Proceeding eighty miles into the northwest wind, you reach the city of Euphemia, where the merchants of seven nations gather at every solstice and equinox. The boat that lands there with a cargo of ginger and cotton will set sail again, its hold filled with pistachio nuts and poppy seeds, and the caravan that has just unloaded sacks of nutmegs and raisins is already cramming its saddlebags with bolts of golden muslin for the return journey. But what drives men to travel up rivers and cross deserts to come here is not only the exchange of wares, which you could find, everywhere the same, in all the bazaars inside and outside the Great Khan's empire, scattered at your feet on the same yellow mats, in the shade of the same awnings protecting them from the flies, offered with the same lying reduction in prices. You do not come to Euphemia only to buy and sell, but also because at night, by the fires all around the market, seated on sacks or barrels or stretched out on piles of carpets, at each word that one man says -- such as "wolf", "sister", "hidden treasure", "battle", "scabies", "lovers" -- the others tell, each one, his tale of wolves, sisters, treasures, scabies, lovers, battles. And you know that in the long journey ahead of you, when to keep awake against the camel's swaying or the junk's rocking, you start summoning up your memories one by one, your wolf will have become another wolf, your sister a different sister, your battle other battles, on your return from Euphemia, the city where memory is traded at every solstice and at every equinox.

Perhaps all stories are love stories in their way: one man hunts for treasure, or for power, another hungers for knowledge or reassurance, or plunges from one unsatisfying pleasure to another. Do they love less because their love is incorporeal, dedicated to an ideal, a dream, a restless feeling? There are stories of men who fall for will-o’-the-wisps, spirits of fire and air beyond mortal touch. Are they not in love, because there can be no earthly union with the beloved? Indeed, the poets teach us the ultimate Beloved is God, and all mortal love is subsumed in the divine. 

Still, for me, there was always an earthly love, a single woman to whom I devoted all my days, for whose sake I turned away from every other cause. You should have seen her sitting in the dust outside her grandmother’s tent - a fine tent it was, with blue-green tassels and countless silver bells. I have seen much of beauty since, beauty in every form and colour, but truly never anything to match my Layla of the dark eyes. Her hair was scented with musk, and she was too serious to ever smile, although surely her mouth was formed for smiling. Her fingers were deft, and her feet, when she rose to take her place at the Festival of Fire, oh, her feet danced as though she walked on air. 

My own grandmother was long dead, and my mother too, and I slept at the back of my aunt’s tent, with a gaggle of sons and nephews; nor was it a fine tent, be-tasselled and chiming softly in the hot desert winds. There was a bell for luck at the flap, and few old tassels that might once have been dull red and now were brown, and that was all. I do not mean to complain of it: my aunt was a good woman, and she had boys enough of her own - there was no need for her to take me in. Nor was it a poor tent: it was well mended and well loved. But it was not a tent from which a beautiful woman would select a lover. 

There is a type of bird that lives in the desert, its voice a piercing shriek, like glass against stone, but somehow … not beautiful, but haunting, a sound you can never quite recapture in memory, and long to hear again, as though this time you will fix it in your mind and make it something known, something entirely of this world. I remember once the bird cried out in flight, and Layla turned to watch it go, the wind stirring her hair, and her face upturned as though she looked into the heavens themselves.

It was more normal for the women to be traders, but I had seen the trading camps, and I knew other peoples followed other ways. If I left the safety of our tents, struck out alone, beyond even the desert which was my home, and my mother’s home and her mother’s before her, back to the first days … who was to say what might happen. There were men who were traders; it was even said they held wealth of their own, in their own right. There were men who were scholars, a type of shaman who studied the working of the world. There was even a place where the desert was made of water, not of sand, and you must go not on foot or on camel but on things called ships. I did not quite believe that last, for it was quite beyond my experience, but I knew there was no hope for me if I stayed, one young man among many, so I would go and see what befell.

There is much I could tell you of what happened to me: I am an old man now, and I have had a full life, rich in adventure, and not without success, but I am selfish and wish to die with my own memories, like some great chieftain of the Northern lands, who takes all his goods and his wealth to the grave. But the memory of Layla was with me always, and always I intended to find her, to see again her dark eyes, and try if she could now be brought to smile for me. 

But the way was not at all clear. I remembered the desert, the tents, the cry of a bird, the sway of a camel, but to that young man who set out alone, forsaking the ways of his tribe, the desert was just the desert, and his tribe his tribe. What were they called by strangers? How was that desert marked on maps he had never seen and would not have understood? There are many deserts, and many nomad tents. Where amongst so many dwelt my Layla of the dark eyes? 

I searched a lifetime. There were other women, but none like her. I traded by caravan across the deserts of the earth, learning new tongues, new ways, and asking always where might be found the people who hung silver bells upon their tents. I traded in silver, I traded in thread, and in dyes, blue-green and red and all the rest. I traded in camels and even in exotic birds, a thousand strange and haunting cries to tease the jaded ears of petty kings and too-proud nobles. I sat at the feet of scholars and I spoke to beggars in the street. Much I learnt of life and men, which goes with me now into the final darkness, but one thing I did not learn and cannot tell to you: where that tent was pitched before which sat my Layla with the unsmiling mouth.

You might think I could have given up, sick of searching. Or found some other woman, for whose sake I desired to forget my Layla. Or even that the years, which erode mountains, would have worn away my love, buried it under a thousand novelties, so I no longer cared whether I remembered or forgot. Perhaps for some men it might be so, but not for me. My heart was fixed, true as the northern star. Only now, as I approach death, and cannot know if I will return here again, do I tell you this, losing the very greatest of my treasures, so that I go forth with the memories of a lifetime, but no purpose, no reason for what I did, and what I chose not to do, no memory at all of my love, which gave purpose to my entire life. I do this so that she at least may not entirely die, so that the memory of her will live on in other hearts.

And you who will bear this memory away, what help may I give you? Very little, I fear. I learnt the speech of many desert peoples (with much labour, different as they are from the civilised speech that was my birthright), but it brought me no closer to her. Indeed I cannot know if the man from whom I heard the tale was the man who loved her first, or if my Layla of the dark eyes has been dust in the desert wind these hundred years, a thousand years, her tribe dispersed, her words forgotten. Only her dark eyes shall not be forgotten, and the wind in her musk-scented hair, and that she would not smile. Only this of her lives on, but you shall not forget it, as I have not forgotten, until it comes time for you to pass it on, one in an endless of line of faithful stewards, bearers of her memory.


End file.
